Daqin Engineers

The vitality of ramie is still relatively tenacious, and for the Warring States Period... to be precise, most of the ancient times were planted in every household.

Didn’t it mean that “men farming and women weaving” were emphasized in ancient times?

If ramie is not planted, it means that there is no raw material for weaving. Without raw material, it is impossible to weave or can only spend money to buy it.

Ordinary poor families are reluctant to spend money on raw materials, usually planting a small piece of ramie and harvesting it for household use. If it doesn't work, they go to harvest wild ramie.

Ramie can be harvested three times a year. The first hemp is about 80 to 90 days, the second hemp is about 50 to 60 days, and the third hemp is about 70 to 80 days. Therefore, only a small piece of land is needed and no care is needed to satisfy a family. Dressing needs.

The initial stage of the weaving workshop was to harvest the ramie land left by the original residents in Yunzhong County.

The original residents moved away with Zhao Wangjia, but the ramie planted in every household stayed in place, and it had not been harvested for a long time and grew very strong, but many of them were frozen to death in the low temperature in winter.

But this doesn't affect its use as a raw material... What is needed for spinning is ramie fiber, and frozen plants can still be used as raw materials.

At the same time, the Huns did not spin threads or weave fabrics, so they were completely disinterested in these ramie, so they left large tracts of ramie in the fields to grow together with the grass.

The textile workshop is temporarily harvesting these ramie as raw materials.

On the other side, the land enclosed here in Yunzhong County was changed to plant five vegetables and ramie because it missed the agricultural period.

Taking the first harvest of ramie in the 80th to 90th days, textile workshops only need to use these "wild" ramie for three months to be "normalized".

Judging from the situation at this time, Shen Bing does not need to worry about raw materials, because the supply of "wild" and "abandoned" ramie is completely oversupply.

After the ramie is harvested into the textile workshop, it enters the production cycle of the textile workshop.

Only more than ten days later, the first batch of fabrics was successfully produced. Because the initial scale was not large, the daily output was only more than 100 horses... But this speed has already made Fusu and others dumbfounded.

As mentioned before, it takes more than a month to weave a horse manually.

And this is the result of weaving fabrics as soon as they wake up in the dark and have free time:

We can weave eleven to twelve pieces of cloth a year, which is just enough for a family of five to make a summer suit and a winter suit.

Among them, winter clothes need more cloth, and children need less cloth, so there is not much difference in balance.

In addition, in previous years, the old clothes were sewn and repaired and put on for a few years, and a few pieces of cloth could be saved for sale to supplement the household. If I had to change and wash my son who was a soldier, I would be nervous.

This is the careful calculation of ordinary people.

But now, Shen Bing has assembled this textile workshop and can easily produce one hundred pieces of cloth a day... This is equivalent to more than a month of weaving by a hundred skilled craftsmen.

And after the textile workshop enters the production cycle, it will continuously produce cloth every day.

Fusu counts it casually...If this is a year, wouldn't this textile workshop be worth the workload of thousands of women?

And this is nothing, because there are currently only more than 200 hydraulic looms. If we continue to expand the scale of the workshop and increase the equipment, the gap will become bigger and bigger.

Shen Bing was not busy expanding the scale because he felt that some reasonable improvements could be made to the hydraulic loom before that.

This hydraulic loom actually has a lot of room for improvement.

But just as the trebuchet had to upgrade itself slowly to maintain its technological advantage, the improvement of the hydropower loom should also be done step by step.

However, some improvements are imminent.

For example, when a waterwheel only drives one weaving machine, the water power and waterwheel waste problems occur. It only needs to connect the main shafts in a simple series and increase the water power. One waterwheel can completely drive five or more looms.

On the other hand, the quality of the cloth needs to be further inspected after it is put into the market, otherwise the problem will be large if the problem is discovered after mass production.

So after ten days, Shen Bing asked Meng Liang to ship the fabrics he produced to Yanmen County for sale...

Although Meng Liang wasn't a businessman, but with his identity and friends everywhere, it is not a big problem where to get through the relationship or even set up a retail department.

Unexpectedly, this batch of cloth was sold out within half a day after it arrived in Yunzhong County: a horse of forty-five dollars is a rare high quality, and it is strange not to be robbed.

As planned, immediately after the cloth was sold, it was replaced with grain and shipped back to Yunzhong County.

This process does not even require tax...

During the Warring States period, taxes on merchants and workers were actually difficult to collect.

Merchants are not bad. For example, if they have fixed shops or sell them in markets, these local counties can levy them if they can participate.

If it’s just a temporary trading place and there is no time to participate, for example, more than a thousand pieces of cloth like Mengliang were shipped and sold out in just half a day... To be precise, it is not concentrated in Yanmen County for sale, but shipped all the way to Yanmen County Sell ​​along the way.

It's just that most of the poor people along the way do not have strong purchasing power, and they are mainly bartering things...The cloth in Yunzhong County supports the exchange of food for cloth.

It is difficult for the government to levy taxes on such transactions.

In fact, let alone the ancient times, even modern times are hard to guard against street vendors or tax evasion.

Not to mention the work status. In this place, if you get part-time jobs and get paid, you leave and change places. The place does not know, is uncertain, and cannot track how much tax each worker earns.

Only the farmer’s taxation is fixed and easy to implement: it is levied according to the land you own, and it can’t escape.

This is also one of the reasons for the emphasis on agriculture and commerce in ancient times and the low status of workers.

But of course, in order not to let people seize the handle, Shen Bing was also for long-term development, so he asked Mengliang to take the initiative to report and pay taxes at Yanmen County.

Everything went well at first.

Yunzhong County is only one hundred and sixty kilometers away from Yanmen County.

One back and forth in five days, the cloth was transported and what was brought back was carts of grain.

It's just that the size of grain and cloth are different, so there is still a surplus.

Meng Liang seemed to enjoy this process very much. When he returned, he said to Shen Bing:

"General, I can go sightseeing all the way, meet with drinkers, and make money by selling cloth."

"In the future, if there is such a good thing, it will be handed over to the subordinate."

In this regard, Meng Liang is actually a bit rebellious.

In fact, he is not short of money, and he has had no worries about food and clothing since childhood.

But because of this, he is also defined by his neighbors and even his family as a "dandy boy"... This kind of people who have never made money and spend money from their family members will have a new experience once they can make money.

It can even be said that this is not just an "experience", but also a kind of "prudence", "confidence" and "proud".

If there is anything that can subdue this cynical boy brother, I am afraid that only this kind of pride comes from his heart.